Deco Pau Cubarsí praise is not exactly a new genre at Barcelona, but the sporting director went further than usual this week. Speaking to RAC1, Deco reached for the highest comparison available inside his own dressing room and handed it to a 19-year-old centre-back.
“Cubarsí is the Lamine of the centre-backs, the most impressive talent there is at the moment,” he said.
Deco on Pau Cubarsí: ‘a tremendous evolution’
It is a line designed to travel, and it did. But the rest of Deco’s answer was the more interesting part, because it was about work rather than talent.
“He has had a tremendous evolution,” the sporting director told the station. “He has grown, he is a leader, he has corrected the small details. A centre-back can’t afford to make a mistake.”
That last sentence is the whole job description. A winger who tries something ambitious and loses the ball gets a shrug; a centre-back who does the same gets a goal conceded and a week of replays. Cubarsí has spent his short career playing an extremely high defensive line under Hansi Flick, where every misjudged step is the difference between an offside flag and a one-on-one. Doing that at 17 was remarkable. Doing it at 19 without the errors is the evolution Deco is describing.
Two Barça teenagers, one Kopa Trophy
The comparison with Lamine Yamal is not only about ceiling. The two of them are genuinely tangled together in this season’s awards conversation: both have been nominated for the 2026 Ballon d’Or, and both are on the shortlist for the Kopa Trophy, given to the world’s best young player.
Yamal, for his part, has already picked a side. When the nominations were announced, he posted on Instagram: “The only winner should be Pau Cubarsí.” Coming from a player with three Ballon d’Or nominations of his own before turning 20, that is not a throwaway compliment — it reads like a team-mate who watches Cubarsí clean up behind him every week and knows exactly what it is worth.
Cubarsí is also the standing favourite for the Golden Boy award, and he was recognised with the Aldo Rovira prize earlier this month alongside his Kopa Trophy nomination. For a defender, that volume of individual recognition is unusual. Awards for young players tend to follow goals.
What he has already won
The résumé is the part that still catches people out. Cubarsí has La Liga and Copa del Rey winners’ medals with Barcelona and a World Cup with Spain, all before his 20th birthday, and he is now a fixture for club and country rather than a prospect being managed carefully.
Wearing the No.5 this season, he has started Barça’s perfect opening to the campaign in a back line that has had to shuffle around him — Ronald Araújo left on loan to Liverpool in the summer, Eric García has been dealing with a broken nose and a suspension, and Jules Koundé and Andreas Christensen have rotated alongside him. The constant has been Cubarsí.
Next up: Levante on Sunday
He will be expected to start again when Barcelona travel to the Estadi Ciutat de València on Sunday (16:15 CEST) to face a Levante side who beat Real Betis 5-2 at home last time out and whose captain, Roger Brugué, has promised his team will arrive with “no inferiority complex”.
Flick’s side have scored in all 34 of their La Liga meetings with Levante, so the goals will probably look after themselves. The more instructive watch, if Deco’s framing is right, is the quiet 19-year-old holding a line 40 yards from his own goalkeeper and refusing to get it wrong.
